And the story itself – of the repressed old lover and the rent-boy– is not an original one. The character study is not of Mitko, though, but the emotionally closed, lost-in-translation American.
The first section of this novel is a changed version of that shorter work, which he says pushed him almost involuntarily to the writing of subsequent parts. In an interview with The Paris Review, Greenwell explains that this novel of three parts – "Mitko", "The Grave", and "Pox" – originated from a novella called Mitko (2010). Mitko is the novel's mysterious heart, presented to us though the inner filter of our American narrator, for whom he is an obsessive object of desire, but who inspires fear and disgust in him too. There is the same kind of unadorned eloquence to the sexual exchanges here as in Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty, which somehow elevates these scenes, even when Greenwell describes sex at its most venal and exploitative. Quickly and fluidly, Greenwell shows us that he is not afraid of writing sex – in its explicit, bodily intimacy – and that he can do so with an ease that is almost a shock from a debut writer. Mitko is found by the American in a toilet in Sofia offering "fast love". That the American narrator seems aware, and in mourning, over the "othering" of this gay "lover" (does he become the lover or is he really a rent boy until the end?) does not entirely excuse their clichéd dynamic. The American is a teacher who lives a "life of inhibition and missed chances" in Bulgaria the younger is Mitko, the beautiful "rough trade" he meets while cottaging in the opening scene. My discomfort, amid my awe at Greenwell's talent, is over the politics of its central relationship: that between an older, richer, expat American and a young, foreign, dispossessed rent-boy lover, who must, through these inbuilt inequalities, play the part of the Other, and never become more human for us. On reading this slight book – the size of a novella with the gravity of a novel – I realise that none of it is hyperbole. Given that this book is about gay desire and shame, what greater honour to have this said by White, who was describing gay desire before Greenwell was born?
"American literature is richer by one masterpiece," says Edmund White. The quotes sprinkle the book cover like a coat of glitter, marking it out for greatness.
Garth Greenwell's first novel is gilded with the kind of praise that debut writers might never dare to imagine for themselves.
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